A leading figure in the Free Church of Scotland has urged the government to allow secularists and the Churches to run their own state-funded schools, to ensure that parents are offered “real choice, real diversity and equality”.

The Rev David Robertson, director of the Solas Centre for Public Christianity, in Dundee, called for a “root and branch review” of state-funded schools as a contentious petition on the provision of religious education reaches the Scottish Parliament.

The pressure group Secular Scotland is campaigning to change religious observance — a regular and meaningful religious assembly — from an opt-out to an opt-in system.

Mr Robertson insisted that religious and secular schools could exist side by side if both were state-funded. He accused Secular Scotland of being “fundamentalist”